Kazakhstan has launched a new transit railway linking China to Europe, aiming to beat rival routes for journey time in the competition to handle a growing flow of goods along the ancient Silk Road trade route.

“Kazakhstan is a virtual bridge linking the East and the West,” Yerkin Meirbekov, deputy railway department chief at Kazakhstan’s Transport Ministry, said in an interview. “You can actually say this is the revival of the Silk Road.”

Centuries ago, it would take months for caravans of camels and horses from China to reach Europe across the sun-scorched steppes and deserts of Central Asia to exchange silk for medicines, perfumes and precious stones.

Now it takes just 15 days for trains carrying containers with electronic goods, construction materials and other cargo to cover the 10,800 km (6,750 miles) route from Chongqing in southwest China to Duisburg in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region.

Late last year, Kazakhstan completed construction of a 293-km (183-mile) stretch from Zhetygen to Korgas at the Chinese border, looping it in to the existing national railway network and opening the second China-Europe link across its territory.

Meirbekov said that the annual volume of freight turnover along the new route, guaranteed by China, was set to total 2 million tonnes this year and would rise eventually to 15 million tonnes.

“The Chinese side, as well as the Kazakh side and European partners – everyone is ready (to handle these volumes) already tomorrow,” Meirbekov said.

“All railways, as well as customs and border guards, are ready to assist fast passage of cargo across their territories.”

Europe-bound trains from China cross from Kazakhstan into Russia. Then they go via Belarus and Poland before reaching Duisburg in Germany.

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Transit routes are a major earner for Kazakhstan’s fast-growing economy, already established as a route for pipelines to pump Central Asian oil and gas to China, reducing the region’s dependency on former colonial master Russia.

“In railways, transit cargo is considered to be net profit, because there are no costs involved – you take in cargo at one border and hand it over at the other. This is a tasty morsel, and all nations are vying for transits,” Meirbekov said.

Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth-largest nation by area which is populated by just 17 million, inherited another railway route to China from the Soviet Union.

This railway, with the Dostyk-Alashankou crossing at China’s border, handled a record 16.5 million tonnes of cargo to and from China in 2012, Meirbekov said, predicting that it would reach it maximum annual capacity of 25 million tonnes soon.

“If you look at China’s prospects, large-scale and intensive development of western China is under way, and output produced there should be exported elsewhere,” he said. “This is why the second (transit) route was built.”

“Sending goods by sea is very cheap – of course, if the client agrees to wait for 45 days,” he said. “But markets are fickle, and you have to move fast.”

Goods to be delivered to Europe from China via Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway would cover 12,000 km and transit time would take between 18 and 20 days, the Kazakh government says, touting its own route.

Oil-rich Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s largest economy, forecasts its gross domestic product to expand by 6 percent this year after a 5-percent rise in 2012.

Kazakh state railway company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) has estimated that cargo transit via its network would reach 35 million tonnes by 2020 and eventually rise to 50 million tonnes.

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Charles van der Leeuw, writer, news analyst, was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1952. He started working as an independent reporter on cultural issues in a wide variety of publications back in 1977. Ten years later, he settled down in war-torn Beirut as an international war correspondent, following a first experience in Iraq in 1985, which resulted in his first book on the Iraq-Iran war. After his kidnapping and release in 1989, his second book “Lebanon – the injured innocence” came out, followed, in early 1992, by “Kuwait burns”. Later in the year, he settled down in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a war correspondent. “Storm over the Caucasus” on the southern Caucasus geopolitical conflicts came out in 1997 in the Dutch language and two years later in the first English edition. It was followed by “Azerbaijan – a quest for identity” and “Oil and gas in the Caucasus and Caspian – a history”, both published in 2000, and “Black & Blue” published in Almaty in summer 2003 about the stormy rise of Russia’s present-day oil and gas companies.
In 2012, he published a bipartite book about the histories of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. His latest publication before this work was “Cold War II: cries in the desert – or how to counterbalance NATO’s propaganda from Ukraine to Central Asia”, published by Herfordshire Press, England, along with books similar to this one on Kyrgyzstan, published in English, French and German editions.